Contr'un
Note on Anarchism and the Rhetoric of Democracy
The battle over the relationship between anarchism and democracy rages on, without necessarily gaining much in clarity. It shouldn’t surprise us, really. The earliest explicit proponents of anarchy had to find a way to place anarchy among a range of otherwise governmentalist possibilities, so we have inherited constructions like “the best form of government is that which does not govern,” leaving us to figure out whether anarchy is the last form of government (“pure democracy”) or the first form of something else–or whether perhaps the choice is largely rhetorical. To be clear, I think the choice is more than rhetorical, […]